“Indeed! I was not aware she was here.”
“Well, I’ll be back in about a quarter of an hour, as I should like to see Mr. Brander,” said Olivia, hastily.
Mrs. Warmington raised her eyebrows. She was longing to tell Miss Denison that she thought, under the circumstances, it would be more modest to stay away; but she did not dare. So Olivia tripped down the stone path, and was in the churchyard before the housekeeper had had time to make up her mind how much of her suspicions it would be proper to communicate to a young girl.
It was some minutes before Olivia succeeded in finding Ned Mitchell. The sun was setting by this time, and there were dark shadows among the ruined portions of the church. It seemed to her as she walked between the newly laid out flower beds with their bright array of geranium, calceolaria, and verbena, that this innovation was out of place, and only showed up, in a more striking manner, the havoc time and tempest had made among the old stones, just as the mowing of the grass upon them had accentuated the irregular mounds and hillocks which filled the ruined south aisle. Olivia stepped in and out and over the mounds, calling softly, “Mr. Mitchell!” At last, in the corner where the old crypt was, she heard a sound coming, as it were, from the ground under her feet. She stopped and listened, holding her breath. The sounds continued, a soft, muffled “thud, thud,” as of some heavy instrument brought again and again down on the earth. She advanced, step by step, always listening, fancying that she felt the ground tremble under her feet at the force of the blows. At last she came close to the place where the rugged steps leading down into the crypt had been blocked up years before. With her senses keenly on the alert, Olivia noticed that some of the stones and earth which blocked the entrance had been recently moved; and prying more closely, she found, behind a bramble and a tuft of rank grass, a small hole, low down in the ground, which looked scarcely large enough for the passage of a man’s body. However, this seemed to be the only outlet from the vault, so Olivia sat down on a broken gravestone, and waited.
It seemed to Olivia to be growing quite cold and dark before a scraping and rumbling noise, as of falling stones and earth, drew her attention to the concealed hole in the ground. She got up, and the noise almost ceased.
“It is I, Mr. Mitchell,” she said, without being able to see him; “I’ve been waiting for you.”
For answer, Mr. Mitchell’s unmistakable, gruff voice murmured a string of sullen imprecations, of which, luckily, nothing was distinctly audible. However, he put his head out of the hole, and then proceeded to extricate the whole of his person with such exceeding neatness and cleverness that the hole was scarcely enlarged, and the bramble and grass remained intact. He presented a strange appearance, however, for he was in his shirt sleeves; a colored silk handkerchief was bound round his head down to his eyes; in his right hand he held a common kitchen poker; while he was so covered with mould and dust from head to foot that but for his peculiarly heavy movements and rough voice he would have been unrecognizable.
“Well, what are you doing here?” he asked, very ill-humoredly, as he shook himself free from some of the dust he had collected in his subterranean exploration. “I thought I heard somebody messing about up here. How did you get in?”
“In the same way that you did, except that I asked for a key instead of taking one without asking.”
She was alarmed to see, when he had wiped some of the dirt off his face with his handkerchief, that he looked savagely self-satisfied, and quite beyond all reasoning. This was proved clearly by his next words. He nodded his head quietly while she spoke, and then said—